A euro coin used to advertise prices in a Madrid pizza house. The cost of Spain's government borowing remains high. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

Political history was made in Brussels on Thursday night. But was the eurozone debt crisis solved and was the survival of the euro assured? That, don't forget, was the primary purpose of the summit. It's hard to be confident markets will give a decisive thumbs-up soon. Extreme wariness – Friday's snap reaction – looks more likely.

The short-term problem is: how will Italy and Spain finance their budget deficits if their costs of borrowing remain high? Today's yields on 10-year bonds – 6.4% for Italy and 5.8% for Spain – threaten to be ruinously expensive if they are endured for long.

But the summit did not agree to throw huge sums of cash at the problem. The size of the two bail-out funds – the European financial stability facility and the European stability mechanism – has been capped for now at €500bn. Another €200bn will head from Europe to the International Monetary Fund and then return to Europe, with perhaps another €250bn added over the course of the journey by the IMF.

Tot it all up, while adding a bit for leveraging of the EFSF, and, at a push, you've got €1.5 trillion. That's enough to cover Italy and Spain's financing needs for the next three years, calculates thinktank Capital Economics. But is that enough to make owners of Italian and Spanish IOUs feel comfortable about the quality of their pieces of paper? Probably not. Italy's debts alone total €1.9bn and what bond markets really want to see is an end to pass-the-hat-around financing solutions cobbled together at supposed make-or-break summits.

The European Central Bank, however, is muzzled by its mandate (it can't finance eurozone governments) and Germany, for all its enthusiasm for closer fiscal integration, is not keen on sharing debts via jointly guaranteed eurobonds.

The longer-term problem is also well known: how do you rebalance demand within the single currency bloc? At the moment, investment and cash tends to flow towards ultra-competitive Germany and the north and away from the Mediterranean. That trend seems unlikely to be reversed by ensuring budgets of eurozone governments are "balanced or in surplus," which is the thrust of the new "golden rule." As Trevor Greetham, a fund manager at Fidelity, puts it these are "fair weather policies not able to deal with current imbalances, which were not primarily related to government spending but to a lack of competitiveness".

Nor does the weather forecast look encouraging: the eurozone may already be in recession.